Dickens ('Boz') in Boston, 1842 and 1867-78

Charles Dickens ('Boz') in Boston, January 1842

At age 29, among professional writers Charles John Huffam Dickens was the
lion of the English-speaking world: author of half-a-dozen popular novels,
beginning with The Pickwick Papers in 1836-7.
But although he had topped the American best-seller lists with such
serial works as The Old Curiosity Shop, thanks
to American pirates — publishers in Boston and New York who did
not recognise English and European copyrights — he had collected
virtually no royalties from his burgeoning transatlantic readership.
Beginning in April 1841, he had resumed his correspondence with American
author Washington Irving, sounding out the possibility of visiting
American shores — and of writing a travelogue in the manner of
Frances Trollope and Capt. Marryat, since the British public seemed to
have an appetite for such travel literature about the new republic. By
September, he resolved to see for himself the republic of his dreams,
the grand experiment in democracy and meritocracy of which he declared
himself a citizen in spirit.

Preparing to sail from Liverpool, the young author solicited letters
of introduction to significant Bostonians and New Yorkers, and
subsequently received invitations. The Dickenses began what would turn
out to be a rough passage on 4 January 1842. Landing at Boston's Long
Wharf aboard the Royal Mail Steam Packet Britannia at 5:00 P. M.
on 22 January 1842, Charles Dickens, accompanied by his young wife, Catherine,
received a hero's welcome from common readers and the Boston intelligentsia
alike. A dozen newspaper editors and numerous journalists leapt on board to
get interviews. The society painter Francis Alexander rescued the couple
from the importunate fans, and escorted them to their waiting carriage,
which took them through the city to the Tremont House (built in October
1829), where T. Colley Grattan, the British Consul, welcomed them. The
streets of the Massachusetts capital with their neat shop-fronts,
striking him as if they were the backdrop of a Grimaldi pantomime,
prompted him to cry out, like that celebrated British-Italian clown,
"Here we are!" Among those eager young men of the professional classes
who received him in Boston were Harvard Professor Cornelius Felton,
anti-slavery activist and Anglophile Richard Henry Dana (author of the
1840 best-seller Ten Years Before the Mast),
William Prescott, Daniel Webster, Harvard Professor Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Dickens's near contemporary,
prominent lawyer Charles Sumner, who became the Dickenses' host in the
mad round of Beacon Hill drawing room receptions. (Perhaps based on such
American acquaintances as Longfellow, Emerson, and Washington Irving, Mr.
Bevan in Martin Chuzzlewit is a non-practising
— and therefore, presumably, more genteel — physician whose
allusions to Swift and Juvenal betray a liberal education.) Dickens was
hailed in the press as "Boz, the gay personification of youthful genius
on a glorious holiday" (Payne 10). So busy were Charles and Kate with
constant social engagements and public appearances that they hired a
secretary, George Putnam, whom Dickens dubbed "Hamlet." No wonder Dickens
remarked of the city of 125,000, "Boston is what I would like the whole
United States to be." With six daily newspapers, a world-renowned university,
and two professional theatres, The Tremont and The National, Boston was indeed
the most civilised place in America in 1842, and the most English of
American cities. For a month, he and his young wife were wined, dined,
cheered, feted, and dogged by minions of the fifth estate. At the dinner
which the "Young Men of Boston" held in his honour on 1 February at
Papantis Hall as he was about to set out on a tour of New England,
Dickens made the tactical blunder of urging the United States to join
the copyright convention, a suggestion that met massive resistance in
the popular press.

Dickens lingeringly, and step by step, from the day when
he landed at Halifax, to the 7th of June, when he re-embarked at New
York for England. From Boston he went to New York, where the great
dinner was given with Washington Irving in the chair, and thence to
Philadelphia and Washington, — which was still the empty "city of
magnificent distances," that Mr. Goldwin Smith declares it has now
ceased to be; — and thence again westward, and by Niagara and
Canada [the cities of York (Toronto), Kingston, Montreal, and Quebec],
then back to New York. [Marzials 32]

"Here we are [again]!" — Dickens as the Professional
Entertainer, 1867

As Kaplan remarks, like Charles Darnay in A Tale
of Two Cities Dickens felt himself "drawn to the loadstone rock,"
knowing that the rigours of the journey might well be his undoing, but
the rock was American gold and the motivation was anything but
altruistic.

Dickens had always meant to return to the United States,
but affairs both public and private constantly supervened, so that only
in early 1860 was he was free — and then the Civil War
erupted.

So he sailed for Boston once more on the 9th of November,
1867. The Americans, it must be said, behaved nobly. All the old grudges
connected with "The American Notes," and "Martin Chuzzlewit," sank into
oblivion. The reception was everywhere enthusiastic, the success of the
readings immense. Again and again people waited all night, amid the
rigours of an almost arctic winter, in order to secure an opportunity of
purchasing tickets as soon as the ticket office opened. There were
enormous and intelligent audiences at Boston, New York, Washington,
Philadelphia — everywhere. The sum which Dickens realized by the
tour, amounted to the splendid total of nearly £19,000. [Marzials
152]

What made him waver when such a golden reward beckoned? Fred Kaplan
in his candid biography of Dickens presents the case for and against the
American tour succinctly: just having completed the last of fifty
readings in the British Isles on 14 May 1867, Dickens was both
exhausted and unwell, afflicted by gout, Erysipelas, neuralgia, cardiac
symptoms, and bleeding piles. His feet so swollen that he could not walk
unaided for some weeks, the writer was unsure of himself physically,
although he had memorized thoroughly a fresh round of readings, including
excerpts from Dombey and Son. At this time, he
he reported himself so tired that he could "hardly undress for bed"
(cited in Kaplan 507). And then there was the matter of Ellen Ternan:
dare he take his young mistress with him on his six-month tour of the
Land of the Pilgrim Fathers? Sending his tour manager, George Dolby, out
to Boston on August 3 as an advance guard, he learned that he would not
receive a positive reception, were he to bring her to Boston. On 28
September, 1867, in conference at Dolby's home at Ross-on-Wye with his
manager and his business agent, John Forster, he finally succumbed to the
lure of Yankee dollars.

Now the author of a more serious kind of literature than the mere
picaresque of his early period, Dickens returned to New England with some
trepidation, remembering how his campaign for copyright, as well as his
satirisation of American manners and institutions in American Notes and Martin
Chuzzlewit, had raised a firestorm of controversy in America. But
he had changed, his motives for the second trip were largely pecuniary,
and most of the people in his sell-out houses in Boston were quite
unfamiliar with the causes of the Dickens controversies of the 1840s. The
Civil War had conclusively settled the pernicious issue of slavery that had
divided the Union, and the American economy was booming once again. He
found the city formerly of a mere 125,000 much changed in terms of
population growth and building, as well as in the ranks of the legion of
friends he had made so long ago, Harvard President Cornelius Felton and
celebrated short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne both having died
within recent years, the former in 1862, the latter in 1864: "some genial
faces were gone, and on ground which he had left a swamp [i. e., the Back
Bay] he found now the most princely streets; but there was no abatement of
the old warmth of kindness. . . ."

"The city has increased prodigiously in twenty-five
years," he wrote to his daughter Mary. "It has grown more mercantile. It
is like Leeds mixed with Preston [the "Coketown" of Hard Times], and flavoured with New Brighton. Only,
instead of smoke and fog, there is an exquisitely bright light air."
"Cambridge" is exactly as I left it," he wrote to me. "Boston more
mercantile, and much larger. The hotel I formerly stayed at [The Tremont
House], and thought a very big one, is now regarded as a very small
affair. I do not yet notice — but a day, you know, is not a long
time for observation! — any marked change in character or habits.
In this immense hotel I live very high up, and have a hotel and cold
bath in my bed room, with other comforts not in existence in my former
day. The cost of living is enormous." [Forster 2: 229-230]

Perhaps he had elected to stay at The Parker House to escape memories
of his salad days (and nights) with Catherine at The Tremont House twenty-five
years earlier. He dined mostly in his Parker House suite, isolated from the
adoring but intrusive public, and seemed to Longfellow, thinking of the hero of
Virgil's Aeneid, fato profugus, a
refugee driven by destiny. In his room he had a large mirror in a black
walnut frame: "it is likely that he paraded his facial impersonations in
front of it" (Ackroyd 1011) while rehearsing in the mornings. After a
light lunch, he was accustomed to walk between seven and ten miles each
afternoon.

At 8:30 P. M., on Tuesday, 19 November, 1867, having put the "Extra
Christmas Number" of All the Year Round to bed
and having left the superintendence of that valuable periodical property
to W. H. Wills, his subeditor, Dickens disembarked from the Cunard Royal Mail
steamer Cuba (launched in 1864 for the Atlantic crossing). After a
ten-day passage, Dickens set foot once again upon the Long Wharf, giving
himself ten days to recuperate from the voyage before the first of four
public readings, sold out after only twelve hours.

He had remarked to Forster, "But the prize looks so large!" (2: 185), as
well it must for the survivor of the blacking factory and debtors'
prison. Dickens simply could not bring himself to refuse the offer of a
guaranteed £10,000 by a consortium of Boston worthies led by publisher
James T. Fields, who as a boy had witnessed Dickens surge forth from the
Tremont House onto Boston's midnight streets clad in a massive fur coat
and in the company of British military man Earl Mulgrave. Now Fields
(aged 50), formerly a mere onlooker, and his wife Annie (aged 33) would
become central players in Dickens's American sojourn, having negotiated
absolute volume rights to the great author's novels for the American
market. Dickens was constantly in their company, and dined with them
often, although he took his sole American Thanksgiving dinner with
Longfellow, a widower after the accidental immolation of his second wife
(Frances "Fanny" Appleton) in 1861. Dickens would have noted his
friend's beard, grown to cover the facial disfiguration that resulted
from his trying to save Fanny from the flames. They ate dinner together
in the very room where the tragic accident had occurred, so that the meal
must have been a sombre affair at best.

Although he had worked with Harper and Brothers of New York since 1852, and
had recently signed a potentially lucrative agreement with Ticknor and Fields of
Boston for exclusive volume rights in America, between 1836 and
mid-century Dickens
must have felt that American piracies had deprived him of a fortune in
sales. In
trying to recoup his lost royalties through one last gruelling reading
tour of the
eastern United States, Dickens as the subject of intense public
interest was also the
subject of equally intense commercial exploitation as American
businesses —
notably Boston tobacconists and bookstores — commodified his
image and name:

Every bookseller's window was stacked up with copies of
Ticknor and Fields's new [Diamond] edition of Dickens, to the temporary
displacement of Longfellow's 'Dante' or Holmes's 'Guardian Angel.' The
cigar shops came out as one man with their brands all newly christened,
and nothing is smoked, chewed, or taken in snuff to-day but 'Little Nell
Cigars,' 'Mr. Squeers Fine Cut,' the 'Mantalini Plug,' and the genuine
'Pickwick Snuff'; while at every turn in the illustrated newspapers, in
the hotel office, and in all the shop windows, the new portrait of Mr.
Dickens [i. e., presumably the same portrait reproduced at the beginning
of A Holiday Romance in Our
Young Folks] is to be seen, showing a man somewhat past middle
life, with thin hair gray, a scanty beard, and eyes downcast reading a
book. [Charles H. Taylor in the Boston Tribune, 2
Dec. 1867, as cited in Payne, 188]

An ardent delegation of some five hundred Harvard undergraduates complained
to Dickens through the popular campus academic, Professor Longfellow, that not
one of them had been able to purchase a ticket, so active had "speculators"
(ticket-scalpers) been prior to 2 December 1867. Dickens and Dolby tried
to to frustrate their entrepreneurial designs, but to no avail, even
though Dickens had hoped to keep prices of less attractive seats low
enough that even working-class readers of his works would be able to
attend. On 30 November 1867 from his suite at the Parker House he wrote
to his son, Charles Dickens, Jr., regarding the rampant speculation in
tickets:

The tickets for the first four readings here (the only
readings announced) were all sold immediately and many are now
re-selling at a large premium. . . . . As they don't seem (Americans who
have heard me on their travels excepted) to have the least idea of what
the readings are like, and as they are accustomed to mere readings out
of a book [as opposed to Dickens's monodrama], I am inclined to think
the excitement will increased when I shall have begun.[cited in Payne
180]

With neither a major election or a public crisis to distract them,
the citizens of Boston were seized with "Dickens-mania"; the city
council had caused the streets to be swept from one end to the other
twice in anticipation of his arrival, and both the Old State House and
the Old South Church of Paul Revere fame painted. At the Tremont
Temple, built in 1827 with a capacity of 2,580, the audience's response
to his readings from the Carol and "The Trial"
from Pickwick, he reported to Forster, was
magnificent on 2 December. The next night he read again, this time from
a condensed David Copperfield from 8:03 to
9:30 P. M., and from another Pickwick
adaptation, "Bob Sawyer's Party," from 9:40 to 10:30 P. M. Wednesday
night he "rested," taking in the Boucicault comedy at the Selwyn
Theatre, Old Heads and Young Hearts, in a box
with Dolby and Fields. On Thursday, December 5, keeping to the same
schedule as Tuesday evening's, he presented yet a third program of
readings, a condensed version of Nicholas
Nickleby entitled "The Yorkshire School" and the entire 1855
Christmas story "Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn," both involving many
characters whom he impersonated with entirely different voices and
expressions. Friday evening's program, again beginning at 8:03 P. M. and
ending at 10:30 P. M., involved yet another new piece, a condensed Dombey and Son, and, as on Monday, "The Trial."

One interesting point about the readings was that Dolby
had heard that 'pirates' planned to send short-hand writers to the
Temple to 'take them down' with a view to their reproduction and sale.
He told Ticknor and Fields of this, and that firm immediately issued the
covers, selling them for so small a price that the pirates could not
hope to compete. [Payne 195]

[This version of the readings Ticknor and Fields included in their
1867-68 "Diamond" Edition of Dickens's works, illustrated by American
artist Sol Eytinge, Jr.)

On the Wednesday, 25 December, he travelled to New York, suffering a
great depression, occasioned in part by a return of his influenza and in
part by his leaving on the railway platform a host of American friends
that included the Ticknors, the Fields, Longfellow, Agassiz, and Holmes.
Ever since the Staplehurst accident, he had not particularly enjoyed
travelling by train, so one may imagine how eagerly he looked forward to
the nine-hour trip to New York. With great relief, Dickens returned to
Boston on the evening of Saturday, January 4, to stay with the Fields at
148 Charles Street, where he had celebrated a traditional English
Christmas dinner — including a punch of his own making — on
Sunday, 22 December. Writing to John Forster again, this time from
Philadelphia on 14 January 1868, Dickens was impressed by the positive
social changes he had observed in America over the past month:

There is much greater politeness and forbearance in all
ways . . . . . On the other hand there are still provincial oddities
wonderfully quizzical; and the newspapers are constantly expressing the
popular amazement at 'Mr. Dickens's extraordinary composure.' They seem
to take it ill that I don't stagger on to the platform overpowered by
the spectacle before me, and the national greatness. [Forster 1:
184]

In Boston, however, despite a deliberate attempt to avoid getting
involved in the mad round of public occasions that so sapped his energy
in 1842, he acquired a few new sterling friends, including the brilliant
science writer and educator Professor Louis Aggasiz, the young scholar
Charles Eliot Norton, and Annie Fields, his publisher's wife. And
Emmerson and Longfellow, though looking much older, were immensely glad
to see him. Among the younger men he met on tour were the illustrators
Sol Eytinge, Jr., and Thomas Nast. On Saturday, November 30, he was the
guest of honour of the Saturday Club, a group of twenty-two literary and
legal celebrities that held its monthly dinners in the private
dining-room of the Parker House. Among his opening night audience were
such old friends and Boston luminaries as William Dean Howells, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, R. H.
Dana, the Fields, the Ticknors, and Charles Eliot Norton. Comfortable
before so enthusiastic an audience, even though it took a
quarter-of-an-hour to settle, Dickens assumed the platform in evening
tail-coat with satin-faced lapels, a profusion of gold chains across his
chest, and "two small red and white flowers in his buttonhole" (Ackroyd
1013) before his standard reading "set": a fifteen-foot maroon back-drop
(seven feet in height), maroon carpet, specially designed reading desk,
and an array of gas pipes to provide appropriate lighting for the
textual moments realised. Throughout the two-and-a-half hour program he
took only a ten-minute break at the interval (9:30 to 9:40 P. M.),
taking the light refreshment of a glass of champagne and a few fresh
oysters.

In point of diet and alcohol consumption he was relatively
abstemious; his usual breakfast (served punctually at 9:30 A. M.) while
staying with the Fields, for example, was a rasher of bacon, and egg,
and a cup of tea. After breakfast, he would converse with his hosts and
their guests until perhaps mid-morning, then retire to write, having but
a glass of wine and a biscuit for lunch at 1:00 P. M., followed by a
three-hour walk prior to an early dinner. On the morning of 6 January,
for example, he and the Fields discussed and even examined a new
invention — the sewing machine. However, on one occasion (the
morning of Sunday, January 5) he broke what would become his routine in
that, having chatted with Dr. Holmes about the 1849 Parkman murder case,
he agreed to walk over to Harvard's Medical School to see the laboratory
of the imfamous anatomy professor, Dr. John White Webster, for it was
there that Webster had attempted to dispose of Parkman's body. Dickens's
interest was undoubtedly stimulated by his having been a guest at a
dinner-party thrown by Webster in Boston in 1842, and by his having
recently run Sir Emmerson Tennent's account of the murder in All the Year Round.

Payne details three altruistic acts of the writer that are not widely
known. In May 1868, Dickens donated $1,700 to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe,
an expert in the education of the blind, who had applied to Dickens in
March for assistance in producing copies of the author's works in
Braille for the thirteen American institutions dedicated to the
education of the visually impaired. Dickens specifically wanted to fund
the production of 250 copies of The Old Curiosity
Shop. The second good deed was the writer's sending $1,000 to
Mrs. Clemm, Edgar Allen Poe's mother-in-law, who he knew to be in
distressed circumstances, Poe having died some five years after Dickens
met him on the initial American tour. Dickens's third act of kindness
involved a Charleston lady, whose infirmity — a paralysis of the
limbs — would have prevented her from attending Dickens's reading
he had not agreed to have the doors of the Tremont Temple opened earlier
so that she might be carried to her seat: "Mr. Dickens sympathetically
acknowledged her note, gave orders that her request be granted and
presented her with complimentary tickets of admission" (from The Boston Transcript, 1868, and cited in Payne,
204).

Although no longer the fashionable London "buck" of 1842, for each of
his Boston constitutionals Dickens was as beautifully dressed as he was
for the stage. In contrast to the conventional dark-hued suits of
Bostonian middle-class males, for his first pedestrian excursion, for
example, Dickens wore

Light trousers with a broad stripe down the side, a brown
coat bound with wide braid of a darker shade and faced with velvet, a
flowered fancy vest . . . necktie secured with a jewelled ring and a
loose kimono-like topcoat with wide sleeves and the lapels heavily
embroidered, a silk hat, and very light yellow gloves. . . . [cited in
Ackroyd, 1011]

The Dickens costumes always attracted attention and much
comment. During the 1842 visit, Kate and Anne, her maid, evidently
looked after them, but in 1867 Dickens had a dresser and valet combined
named Scott. He was also a tailor, expert with needle and thread, and
was so devoted toi the elaborate garments entrusted to his care that he
wept profusely when the rude American 'baggage smashers' were unduly
reckless with Dickens's 'boxes'. [Payne 175]

Despite his exhaustion from keeping so gruelling a schedule of public
readings and various physical ailments, not the least of which was a bad
cold he had contracted in the cold Boston winter, on Saturday, 29
February, he agreed to participate in a "sporting" event well suited to
a man used to walking up to twelve miles a day, even though the weather
involved severe chill and blowing snow and the course involved five
miles of bad road covered in snow — uphill for half the distance.
The language in which Dickens described the contest in a letter to his
daughter suggests a parody of a wrestling or boxing match in that each
contestant is denominated by his place of residence:

This was the day of the 'Great International Walking
Match' between 'The Boston Bantam' (James R. Osgood) and 'The Man of
Ross' (George Dolby), seconded by 'Massachusetts Jemmy' (James T.
Fields) and 'The Gad's Hill Gasper' (Charles Dickens). These names were
given by Dickens himself. As the subtitle of the famous broadside said,
'the origin of this highly exciting and important event cannot be better
stated than in the articles of agreement subscribed by the parties.'
[Payne 225-26]

From the start near the hotel at the intersection of Beacon and
Charles Streets Dickens had the better of his competition, although the
"Bantam" rounded the turning point first. He required an extensive
rub-down back at the Parker House before he could face dinner in the
Crystal Room. Despite the hilarity of the accident after dinner in his
suite, Dickens's falling fully clothed into his drawn bath surely
indicates that he had pushed himself beyond the limits of his endurance:
clowning on the edge of the gigantic tub, he lost his balance and to
George Dolby's delight fell in.

His last day in Boston was Friday, 10 April, when he said his
goodbyes to the staff of the Parker House and then discretely, with
Dolby's aid, descended the carpeted stairs of the hotel to the School
Street door, where he met a carriage to take him to the train station,
the Fields accompanying him to the Westminster Hotel in New York. He
sailed for England on 22 April, never to return.